30 Minutes on: "They Live" | MZS

That's what Roddy Piper's unemployed drifter John Nada learns in "They Live" after he puts on a pair of sunglasses created by rebels who are trying to wake the sheeple up to the reality of the holistic system of systems, the multi-national—in reality extraterrestrial—dominion, which is run by otherworldly colonizers who look like bug-eyed, skinless humans. What he's really seeing is the desperate underbelly of Ronald Reagan's vision of "Morning in America"—a post-Vietnam, happy-gas exhortation quoted by one of the aliens in "They Live." The rich are getting richer. The middle class is increasingly unemployed and stressed-out. The jobless, poor and infirm are out on the street, or else stuck in a "Hooverville"-type camp—like the one John settles in, and that is destroyed by police tactical units and bulldozers once authorities realize that there are revolutionaries hiding among the displaced. "They're free enterprise," says Gilbert (Peter Jason), the same guy warns John and his pal Frank Armitage (Keith David) about the conspiracy. "To them we're just another developing planet...their Third World." Billboards and magazine ads and TV commercials that seem to be selling specific products or services bear subliminal messages, in simple black type on white, ordering us to "Obey" and "Consume" and "Marry and Reproduce" and "Watch TV."

John, who relocated to Los Angeles after the economy in his hometown of Denver collapsed, never considered the possibility that there might actually be an organized conspiracy to exploit working people, anesthetize their brains with tabloid culture and mindless, repetitive TV programs, and systematically rob them of their postwar standard of living, all while promulgating the "level playing field" and "up by your own bootstraps" messages drilled into Americans from birth and repeated by their politics and culture. But those sunglasses glasses reveal the truth—and how appropriate that the film would portray this hidden, horrible reality as black-and-white. There is no subtlety in the movie, no gradations of "color" in its message. It's the ultimate tinfoil hat film; not since "Close Encounters" had an American studio picture so enthusiastically validated the notion that a seemingly insane hero might be seeing a reality that others either cannot see or have chosen to embrace.

Most of the cops in the film are human; some are aware of the conspiracy and most aren't, but they're all part of it. And there are Vichy-type collaborators everywhere, people who've decided to walk that "white line" that Frank Armitage speaks of. This character—named for the screenwriter, who is really Carpenter working under a pen name—is a warm and genial version of the "Good American" who just wants to keep his head down and get paid. It's he that John concentrates on converting, perhaps remembering an early conversation where Frank talks about how the system is rigged against guys like him and John, because "he who has the gold makes the rules." John succeeds in the film's most famous setpiece, and the funniest thing in the movie besides the hero's final bird-flip: a seemingly endless brawl in an alley that finds Frank pounding John into submission, then stumbling away without having donned the glasses, only to have his bleeding adversary come crawling or staggering after him, gasping, "Put the glasses...ON!"